Night Vale Poetry
by jadesfire22
Summary: "Read this," snarled the librarian, and you pick it up. "Night Vale Poetry? Sounds interesting!" "DO IT!" the virago shrieks, and rapidly, you comply. You click the link.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own Welcome to Night Vale. I'm not actually that awesome. Just another mediocre fanfic writer, wreaking havoc upon another fandom with the abusive alliteration and surrealist snobbery of my purple prose - sincere poetry oddly similar to the stuff written ironically for Poetry Week. But this wasn't government-mandated, so I'm afraid I have no excuse. I'm so sorry, so very very sorry.

Night Vale

I.

_Welcome to Night Vale,  
_the sign reads,  
and he remembers that moment clearly,  
seeing the flickering-  
green? purple? Well, some color, anyway-  
sign  
on the edge of town,  
vortex sandstorms  
flitting out in the distance,  
absorbing the sunset's capricious flashes.

_There ought to have been some sort of disclaimer on that sign,  
_he thinks in moments of cynicism.  
_Welcome to Night Vale.  
_As if it were that simple.  
A cheerful smile, a "Hey, new neighbor!" and a batch of arsenic cookies.

But he realizes later  
that maybe that was all he needed to hear

Night Vale.

_Night-  
_never light or clear,  
even in the burning desert sun  
scorching off prisms of sand  
until everything is ultraviolet lightning  
and you close your eyes

You close your eyes to the sun

You close your eyes to this life  
the currents of unconscious, he realizes,  
that the real world just doesn't show.  
The bloodlust, the hate - all public, all accepted.  
Freud might have approved. Less repression that way.  
He certainly feels more free.

But it's there in Night Vale, it's clear as only night can be,  
and in the abundance of light  
sometimes he needs

for a moment

to shut his eyes

and

_Vale-_

vale- a fantasy word  
of green hills and forests,  
a place for knights to battle strange dragons, to gaze into weird wild wellsprings and cavernous chasms,  
to fall in love with starry-eyed, flaxen-haired maidens  
Not used anymore in common parlance.  
Romantic, but passe.  
And besides, here the dragons are running for mayor and the chasms attack you with Lilliputians and the love interests are-  
well, someone else.

But also vale - a Latin goodbye._  
Ave atque vale,_ they said. _Hail and farewell.  
_They said that to the dying gladiators. Or something.  
To the world outside, he was probably dead.  
Lost to the cause of science.  
A martyr. A gladiator.

Noble sacrifice, _in flammas_.  
Like the twin paradox, like relativity.  
Who knows how many years had passed for them?  
His family could be dead.  
Drowsily, he thinks over that and nods.

Vale. 2 syllables. Sounds like valley.  
_Valley. _

But here there are no mountains-  
_how can people "not believe in mountains"?_-  
So the valley can't really have a meaning  
Without some sort of opposite, some sort of contrast.

Like the town.  
Endless evil, with no knowledge it's not perfectly good.  
The perfect innocence of a flat plain,  
twisting,  
spiraling,  
cragging and breaking at approximately 67.5 degree angles to reality (he's done the math)  
endlessly downwards in a valley  
with no bottom  
or top.

_Welcome to Night Vale,  
_the solemn voice intones.

Carlos shivers and thinks back.

Welcome indeed.

That's all he needed to know.


	2. Chapter 2

I still own nothing. Except, I suppose, a few square meters of flesh. But not even that - the elements are borrowed from stars. And they'll want them back eventually. There's quite a high interest rate.

My apologies to Eliot and Frost in addition to the creators of Night Vale.

II.

Listen  
as the stars float, mingle, and glance off together  
like giddy children on a bumper car ride in an amusement park,  
their first tasers flashing static through stale-baked air,

Listen  
tendrils of thought and sound  
snaking out through the night  
everything and anything  
and in the end, nothing at all.

Where would you like to start?

It's where you'll finish.

Doesn't matter.

Does.

Listen  
for the night is warm and dark,  
and promises are feeble threats  
made to a stubborn subconscious  
never real  
never perfect  
so you can afford to stop for a moment  
and listen over your shoulder  
miles to go before you sleep  
(you never will again, quite)

Listen  
for the hollow men dance and the hollow voice rings  
around the prickly pear in the night  
soothing circles spiraling downward  
like a fluttering leaf,  
veins cracked and dried.

Listen  
you are found  
(you are lost)  
you are outside of time and space and logic and fear and fire and love and death  
(except those last two)

Haven't you heard? Reality is dead.

Like all of them, you'll need a mourning period (understandable, acceptable)  
and a lifeline to clutch.

So grab this one.  
Grab the lovely deep sound waves  
rippling out into the fabric of spacetime  
tinging the darkness with a velvet density curvature  
tidal forces breaking, stretching, gently lowering  
you to your new world  
Just grab on  
and ride home

Grab this lifeline

The Voice bids you

Listen


	3. Chapter 3

I own nothing. What is ownership? What is nothing? What is "I"? WHAT IS THIS GIANT BLACK BOX AND WHY HAS IT APPEARED RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME?

Apologies to those with taste.

III. Revolution

You don't need me. I just report the news.  
You don't need heroes-

What are heroes?

A young girl standing on a scalloped dune  
With violence and intelligence on her side,  
Blood-streaked books and ink-stained knives  
and furious proclamations  
streaming, teeming, from her haunted genius brain?

A man, alone except for the sound of his own voice,  
Tapping a Morse code staccato into the desperate darkness?  
Powerless, behind the scenes,  
Half-accepting, apathetic,  
Half-mildly guilty of his acceptance?

A man, trying to find the truth?  
Screaming into a concrete wall,  
Into a vortex,  
About time and space and existence and suffering,  
And how _things aren't supposed to be this way,  
and why won't anyone see it?_

The truth is boring. The truth is unnecessary. The truth is forbidden.

Fantasy, au contraire, is exciting, necessary, and very much encouraged.  
You won't survive without it -  
that's why we concoct heroes.  
We need an image,  
a silhouette.

A librarian's head and a slingshot and a paperback.

Headphones and a microphone and a hunched spine.

Beakers and electrical equipment and a lab coat.

We dehumanize,  
simplify.

It's more interesting,  
more poetic.  
On some level,  
we need it.

And on some level,  
we absolutely don't.

We need -  
not feeble archetypes promising some sort of light or hope or revolution-  
but ourselves.

Please, selves, come back.

Where have you gone?

We post "Lost" signs and rewards for anyone who finds the traces of our souls.

But there's no one at all to ask or look for,  
and the thin plastic flyers flutter away into the wind,  
swept beneath the barbed wire fences  
and impaled on splintering stakes.

Someone find us.

Please.


End file.
